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Oracle Customer Success — Mashburn

Mashburn and Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service

Textura’s system allowed us to increase our business substantially over a period of several years without adding to our accounting or administrative staff. That is remarkable. Using CPM has made a difference in terms of our margins and helped us to become even more profitable as we grow.

— Robert Parsons, Chief Financial Officer

General contractor implements the Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service (formerly Textura-CPM) solution to increase control over payment management, discovers the solution’s power also to support growth while holding down costs. Amid considerable growth in its business, the scalability of CPM has allowed Mashburn to maintain a constant level of accounting staff and improve its margins.

Mashburn Construction in 2004 faced a critical operational problem. Because its subcontractor payment process was disjointed and internal controls were at times inadequate, Mashburn was struggling to properly manage invoicing and payment. At the time, the general contractor would often receive three or four versions of the same invoice—each with a different amount billed—with those documents arriving via mail and fax or exchanged by hand at the jobsite. The resulting jumble of inconsistent paperwork, combined with internal challenges related to its project management, made the entire payment process extremely time- and resource-consuming. But the chief concern for the company was that this fragmented and ineffective payment management process was resulting in errors and enabling subcontractors to bill—and be paid—for change orders that had not been approved. This challenge was creating a potentially damaging financial exposure for Mashburn.

When Chief Financial Officer Robert Parsons joined Mashburn in 2004, he immediately recognized that the general contractor needed to find a way to dramatically improve its control over invoicing and payment processes. The Mashburn CFO learned about Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service while attending a conference in 2005 and said that he was drawn chiefly to the idea that with the solution, “nobody can bill Mashburn for anything we haven’t approved.”

Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service moves the payment management process online, integrating all process components into a seamless workflow that reduces risk, improves control and enhances visibility. By bringing general contractors and subcontractors together in a web-based project workspace, Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service creates a robust payment approval process that enables all parties to collaboratively review and revise payment documents, including change orders, to prevent errors or inappropriate billing. Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service also improves compliance management, facilitates the secure electronic exchange of lien waivers, and enables electronic payments to subcontractors via electronic funds transfer. Because of increased process efficiency and transparency, subcontractors can be paid faster, and gain greater visibility into their compliance and payment status.

After deciding to implement Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service in late 2005, Mashburn worked closely with the client services team to set up the solution for one project that would serve as a pilot. As part of that process, Mashburn selected a project manager it knew understood the value and would devote the attention necessary to manage the process changes. In addition, Mashburn invited all of its subcontractors to a presentation on the solution by the client services eam. Because subcontractors incur modest fees to use Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service, Mashburn in particular wanted to demonstrate the value of the solution to them.

Mashburn immediately saw improvements in efficiency and process control, Parsons said. Rather than chasing down paper documents at various locations and spending hours trying to reconcile conflicting versions of payment materials, Mashburn’s project and accounting staff were able to use Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service to process payments, modify subcontractor pay applications and resolve issues electronically—all in near real time. By creating a “single version of the truth” for every invoice and all related materials, Mashburn’s project team and all subcontractors had full visibility into payment and change order status, preventing overbilling and underbilling. In addition, the tracking of compliance materials greatly enhanced visibility for the project team in the field, and the ability to hold payment based on compliance status provided another key level of of control. With the workflows routing materials to the appropriate recipient at all stages of the process and automated notifications keeping everyone on track, Mashburn’s staff was able to become considerably more productive, the CFO said. “The cost benefit was evident in project one,” he said.

Mashburn’s efforts to proactively educate its subcontractors about the benefits of Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service also paid off. “Every one of those subcontractors today is an advocate of Textura, because it helps them get paid faster,” Parsons said, noting that the improved transparency, better communication and faster payment enabled by Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service have helped Mashburn strengthen its relationships with subcontractors.

Limiting the Cost of Growth

Following the successful pilot launch, Mashburn began rolling out Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service to other projects, and the benefits multiplied. As the rollout continued, the team was frequently onsite, working closely with Mashburn to ensure that implementation was smooth, that project managers and administrators were properly trained, and that the company had a robust internal support system for new users. Within a year, the general contractor was fully implemented on Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service. With virtually all of its projects using the solution, Mashburn was able to establish a standardized approach to payment management across its three offices.

As it continued to add new projects to Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service, the general contractor began to see another significant benefit from using the solution on nearly all projects: Its business was growing considerably, but its accounting and administrative staff was not. “Textura’s system allowed us to increase our business substantially over a period of several years without adding to our accounting or administrative staff. That is remarkable. Using CPM has made a difference in terms of our margins and helped us to become even more profitable as we grow,” Parsons said.

Mashburn estimates that using Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service on virtually all of its projects allows it to save the equivalent of 20 hours per month in accounting work for every 30 pay applications, compared with manual, paper-based processes. From a cost-benefit perspective, Mashburn considers Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service “the fourth person in the accounting department, and that’s before you even start to quantify the benefits to the project management and administration teams,” Parsons said.

Project managers, he said, are saving roughly 6 hours per month by using Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service. Mashburn’s four project administrators, meanwhile, are saving an average of 5 hours per month. Without Oracle Textura Payment Management Cloud Service, the general contractor would need another full-time equivalent PA staff member to manage its current workload, Parsons said.

This story was originally published on www.texturacorp.com.

About Mashburn

Headquarters

Columbia, South Carolina, United States

Founded in 1976, Mashburn Construction is a full-service construction company providing construction management, design/build and general contracting. For over three decades, the company has exemplified Building with Integrity by providing superior service and quality to clients in the healthcare, historical renovation, hospitality, industrial, institutional, and church construction markets. For more information, please visit www.mashburnconstruction.com.